Timing is everything

(1965 photo by Chuck Hite)

I have been lucky in my career path. Good timing has been everything.

I started work at WCOD FM in the early 1960s, when few people owned radios capable of receiving an FM signal. I think there was a total of one FM radio in my family's house.

WCOD FM was in many ways a plaything then for Wilbur Havens, who owned an auto-parts store before he got his start in radio. What was to be his broadcasting empire began in 1926 when he built an early Richmond radio station, WMBG AM. The call letters stood for "wires, magnetos, batteries and generators." The station grew to be a success. World War II put a halt to broadcast engineering development, but in 1947, Havens started WCOD FM, which was among the first FM stations in Richmond. Nobody had an FM radio, but Havens was a pioneer

A year later, Havens made the decision that was to make him a millionaire many times over. He began broadcasting television pictures on WTVR TV on April 22, 1948. His was the first television station south of Washington, D.C., and for decades the on-the-hour ID billed it as "the South's first television station." By the early 1960s, it was a roaringly popular CBS network affiliate. WMBG, however, was stuck in the past, and WCOD's future was still ahead of it.

In those days, Havens was making money hand over fist -- almost exclusively because of the popularity of WTVR. My part-time job at WCOD had me doing FM station breaks and local-live commercials during baseball games. I had been a rock-jock at two other dinky radio stations in Richmond, but I saw the job at WCOD -- the letters stood for "Capital of the Old Dominion" -- as a foot in the door at a respectable radio-TV operation.

At WCOD, the relationship between me and the station's old-guard announcers was just about what you'd expect. They saw me as a kid still wet behind the ears. (I was a college sophomore majoring in journalism at the University of Richmond.) I saw them as old fogies who still dressed up to sit in front of a radio microphone and broadcast to my father's generation. They presided over a morning music show designed to awaken you gently, light classic and romantic favorites in the afternoon and evening, and a solid block of ABC network news and features from 5 to 6:30 p.m. There was still a half-hour organist interlude each evening, broadcast live.

The stations had an amazingly extensive record library -- it filled much of the basement of the building -- and a full-time music librarian who spent her days selecting recordings to be played by the stodgy announcers. (She was unfailingly helpful to me.) Fully half of the collection was 78-rpm recordings. The remainder consisted of LP albums.

WMBG and WCOD (which was experimenting with early automation) did radio as it was done in the 1940s, and the ratings for both stations were in the tank. The hot radio station in town was WLEE. It played nothing but rock and roll music, all day long. It was wildly successful in its appeal to an emerging demographic: War Babies and Baby Boomers.

(What I sometimes neglected to appreciate in those days was that the people I worked with had built radio and TV in Richmond. They were the first generation of broadcasters and engineers, and I learned a lot from them without knowing it.)

The program director for the two radio stations was a distinguished gentleman named Frank Wilson. He wore a coat and tie to work every day, and he had an office with a door and a secretary. Nothing had changed at either station since 1948, so his days were not full of pressing decisions. I had been lobbying him quietly and gently to add a rock-and-roll show to one of the stations, preferably WMBG AM, since an FM radio was a rarity in most homes or cars. I wasn't getting anywhere.

Then the penny dropped for Havens.

He must have been sitting in his paneled corner office, the one with the glass-brick wall fronting Broad Street, when his attention wandered from his money machine, WTVR TV, and settled on his money-losing property, WMBG.

"Let's try to beef up our AM station again. Rock and roll -- I don't like it or understand it, but I hear you can make money with it on the radio. We've got that kid -- what's his name? -- Dale, who used to be a rock-and-roll deejay before he came to work for us. Let's give him the afternoon show."

That conversation happened only in my own head, but Frank Wilson called me into his office one day and told me to start a rock-and-roll show on WMBG AM every afternoon from 3 to 7. Gone, just like that, were the light afternoon show, the organ interlude and the network news blocks. Drive time on WMBG, with its 5,000 watts of power, was all mine. I was also, probably, giving Wilson an ulcer.

It wasn't my talent that got me my own rock show on WMBG. It was timing. And rock and roll.

WMBG gave me nothing for support but my imagination, a Magnecorder tape recorder, two turntables, a couple of Spotmaster cartridge machines (you can see one behind me in the previous entry) for playing commercials, and a free hand.

Within weeks, I was working like crazy to make us sound like WLEE, the city's only rock-and-roll powerhouse. (So much for my imagination.) Then I discovered that ABC fed its New York affiliate's afternoon rock show on the line when the radio network itself was down, just to keep the line open. I became a secret fan of WABC's Big Dan Ingram and was soon copying what the really big boys were doing in Manhattan. (Again, so much for my imagination.)

The time was ripe, and I was an oh-so-willing participant.

The next ratings book showed that WMBG had moved halfway up from the bottom. Within 9 months, we were neck-and-neck with WLEE. We were a hit. Havens made me WMBG's music director. A few months later, Frank Wilson left as program director, and I took on his responsibilities too. Havens gave the go-ahead to go all-rock all-the-time on WMBG.

I'll give them credit: Several of the old guard announcers tried to switch their styles and morph into rock jocks. It didn't work, and they left the station fairly quickly. Their departures left me, a sophomore in college, with my own rock-and-roll station, my own drive-time rock show, and the power to create an on-air sound. I was hiring jocks my age -- late teens, early 20s -- to fill the schedule. My teenage dream was a reality.

I was too young to know what I was really doing -- and gave no thought whatsoever to commercial radio as a money-making enterprise. I was in it because it was more fun than anybody ought to have with their clothes on.

Unfettered authority led to some weird programming on occasion.

Pat Chenault -- a descendant of the man who founded the Coca-Cola franchise in eastern North Carolina and a shrewd businesswoman herself -- was a WMBG account executive. She talked a local Kawasaki motorcycle dealer into giving me a 125cc bike to ride and sold them a contract for live Kawasaki commercials on my show. For a while, it sounded like Kawasaki owned me.

When it snowed in late 1962, I took a microphone with a long cord out to Broad Street and broadcast my show in the snow. The fun of doing that lasted about 20 minutes.

Pat Chenault sold a live broadcast of the Tobacco Festival parade one year. That was exciting, until I found myself sitting on the roof of the White Tower at Lombardy and Broad in the cold describing a parade on the radio. That broadcast wasn't so great.

She dreamt up and sold a series called "Teen Time." It featured two-minute reports on my show from area high schools. The sponsor was the local Coca-Cola franchise. Nobody gave any thought in advance to who or how the weekly series was to be produced. She and I wound up spending way too many hours recruiting high school volunteers, going over their copy, coaching them on how to be broadcasters, and recording and editing their segments. It was a time-suck, but it helped build the audience.

(I made a couple of friends among that group that are important to me still. Walter Foery, my boon travelling companion even today and whom I mentioned in an earlier post, is prime among them.)

Our only problem was that Havens wasn't giving us any support money. He paid paltry salaries, and there was no money for equipment upgrades, a jingle package, consultants or external promotion. He did have a few contracts trading TV and radio commercials for taxicab cards, bus cards and billboards, so the faces of WMBG's new jocks began showing up all over the city.

We were young and in love with what we were doing, so we spent hours of our own time after hours creating production elements to enhance the station's new, contemporary personality. We stole "stingers" (up-tempo musical tags) from the ends of Frank Sinatra hits to dress up on-air promotions. We cannibalized an upbeat 1940s recording of "By the Sea" to produce our on-air beach forecasts (thank goodness for that extensive music library in the basement). We used the Magnecorder to produce rudimentary echo effects. And I found a toy bicycle horn somewhere that I used to punctuate my afternoon show. We were enthusiastic, the audience could hear that we were, and the ratings kept on climbing. Within a year, the station coughed up the money for a second-rate jingle package, half of which we rejected for being our fathers' sound. The rest were pretty good, and another production element began to fill our shows. We were overproduced and too talky by today's standards, but we offered a rock-radio alternative that the audience wanted.

(That extensive music library, which went back to 1930, was much later moved to the WMBG transmitter site at Staples Mill and Broad. The librarian left. The collection was destroyed when the station leveled the transmitter building and sold the property. What a loss that was.)

Even WTVR TV began sounding younger. That's because Havens always had his radio employees double as TV booth announcers -- for station ID work, promotional tags and local commercials. There were no more mature, resonant voices saying "You're watching WTVR TV, the South's first television station" or "Stay tuned for 'I love Lucy.'" Those voices had gone elsewhere. Instead, the audience for the Cronkite news or the ever-popular "Beverly Hillbillies" and "Green Acres" heard some kid's voice, mine among them. I'd spend an hour a day in the announce booth recording every station ID and promotion to be heard on TV that evening.

The radio station's engineers, all veterans of the early days, were particularly annoyed by us rock jocks. They hated the fact that we would crank up the studio speakers to appreciate that Phil Spector Wall of Sound on "He's a Rebel." The engineers put some sort of volume-limiting device in the speakers themselves. One of the jocks figured out how to disable it, and the engineers lost that battle. They admonished us for pushing the on-air music volume into the red on the VU meter. We made an effort to hold it down, but it was never enough to satisfy. Eventually, these respected pioneers in Richmond radio engineering simply gave up and let us have our way. Perhaps Havens told them to back off because WMBG was making money again.

The British Invasion was just around the corner. And we were ready. Then came the JFK assassination on November 22, 1963, and I learned a lot about what would become my long-term profession: news. More on that in the next blog post.